By Kara Dudley

“Enquire at Reception about Extended GP Access”

or

“Ask at Reception for an evening or weekend appointment”

Which sounds better? Which is easier for your patient to understand?

When you work in primary care, it can be all too easy to rely on the jargon that we all use on a daily basis. ‘Extended GP access’ might be the term you use with your CCG, but to Doris it’s confusing.

And it isn’t just down to the words we use.

Health literacy is a massive problem, especially in practice areas with higher levels of deprivation or where English isn’t always the first language.

Patients with lower levels of health literacy are more likely to suffer from health inequalities which in turn can have a detrimental impact on their health and well-being and on their ability to self-care.

That’s not what we want for the local people we serve.

Why health literacy matters to GP practices

Providing equality of care for all your patients means understanding that literacy levels vary throughout the population. For example, a couple of cases highlighted by Jonathan Berry who works with the NHS’s Person-Centred Care Team include:

• A lady who felt there was no way her chemotherapy could be working because it was being applied to a different part of the body to where the cancer was actually situated. Simple verbal or written communication could easily rectify this kind of situation.
• A patient who applied an inhaler on her neck as she had been advised to use it on her throat. Again, very simple verbal directions or written communications explaining how to use the inhaler correctly could have avoided this.

It’s worth remembering that the average reading age in the UK is between 9 and 11 years old, and around 15% of the UK’s adult population is also classed as functionally illiterate. This often makes it difficult for timely communications to take place, as these individuals need family members or friends to read correspondence for them.

So how do you tackle health literacy when you’ve got another 15 things on your to-do list before lunchtime?

The World Health Organisation defines health literacy as: ‘…the personal characteristics and social resources needed for individuals and communities to access, understand, appraise and use information and services to make decisions about health. This includes the capacity to communicate, assert and enact decisions’.

Using the most ‘brain-friendly’ (i.e. easily accessible and memorable) marketing communications can make a significant impact on your practice. Ultimately, successful health literacy has a positive effect on all patients, so why wouldn’t you want to improve it?

Improving health literacy locally isn’t just down to you, but by using a few of the practical tips below, you can improve it for all your patients and reduce confusion and misunderstandings too.

How you write 

• Avoid jargon at all costs. Not sure how to simplify something? Check out: ProWritingAid or The Plain English Campaign’s free ‘Drivel Defence’ widget to make sure you’re using plain English. If you must use a difficult word, explain what it means.
• Keep your sentences short at all times. Concise sentences are far easier to read and understand. Can you include lists or bullet points which can be read more easily?
• When writing anything, always consider: ‘WHO is this for’, ‘What do they NEED to know’ and ‘WHY do they need to know it’. If the ‘What’s in it for me?’ message isn’t clear, your patients will ignore your communication or, worse still, be left feeling confused.
• Create a jargon ‘blacklist’ – i.e. terms and phrases that staff members and members of the public deem to be ‘unpopular’. Once identified, you can remove them from use and replace them with easier-to-understand choices. ‘In relation to’ is one of my all-time, pet-peeve terms; just say ‘about’!
• Use active verbs, not just to liven up your content but to deliver your message more quickly to the brain:

The nurse will give you fresh dressings (active)

Fresh dressings will be given to you by the nurse (passive)

Our Flu Clinic is open this Saturday (active)

From this Saturday, appointments will become available in our clinic for flu jabs (passive)

Presentation

• Don’t photocopy leaflets over and over again. Text loses legibility which could affect someone with literacy (or vision) issues – not to mention, it looks unprofessional. An online printer may be able to print it professionally for less than you think.
• Speak to your CCG comms and engagement team for advice on providing information in another language or format. They will have the contacts.
• Run communications, such as practice newsletters and web banners, past people sat in your waiting room or your PPG. If it’s complicated or too text-heavy, people with low literacy won’t even attempt to read it.
• Use simple visuals which complement the text rather than just to ‘pretty it up’. People are drawn to visual information first, so if your images make no sense, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
• Use lots of white space and make images as big as you can without them becoming ‘pixelated’. Try to avoid stock images too. Include photos of your team and spruce them up using filters and cropping. People trust people they know or who look like them – a key part of improving health literacy levels.
• Consider recording your leaflets or key information as audio-only files. You can easily do this using the voice-recorder setting on your smartphone and saving it as an MP3 file or uploading it to YouTube. Try to find a volunteer to read it who has a calming or bubbly voice!

About Kara Dudley

Front-line friend to primary care. Champion of common sense and ‘reyt’ simple words. Kara is a healthcare marketing specialist living and working in Yorkshire.

https://yorkshiremedicalmarketing.com

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